Rhythm and Self-perception – Performatively Disrupting the Self by Paying Attention to Attention

Abstract

The contemporary discussion about attention is often inextricably connected with moral judgments about how, and to what, should we pay attention – and with a recurrent vilification of media technologies. Through a shift from a critique to the economy of attention, to the ecology of attention, and considering the poststructuralist debate on the ontotechnology of humans, we show that there is a central concern with the loss of control over the self, and an emphasis on differentiation, order and systematicity. This can be understood as a preoccupation with the rhythm of attention, life, and mediation processes. Art, on the other hand, can be thought of as particular type of space, where experimentation with attention can happen besides everyday assumptions and hegemonic understandings of how attention should manifest. By engaging with an existing artistic piece, Bad Touch, and building on it a series of technologically-driven feedback loop systems that are particularly sensitive to an embodied process of focusing on attention itself, we show how the voluntary loss of control – assisted by technology purportedly aimed at ensuring control – can better help us reflect on attention itself, and on how binary logics of dis/attention, un/control, or in/human fall flat within certain contexts; how the loss of rhythm can hold creative potency precisely because it can be derived from a wilful foregoing of instrumental control. We end by reflecting on what this illuminates in terms of the human/machine, body/mind, artist/artwork dichotomies, and how it can better help us value alterity as a precondition for sameness, and for attention as a system of valuing alterity.